


alibi

by agonies (Hyb)



Series: fulcrum, lever [2]
Category: Big Bang (Band), GOT7, GTOP (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Leverage Fusion, Emotional Blue Balls, Getting Sentimental About Art, M/M, Reformed Criminals, Unresolved Tension, Very Obnoxious Phone Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-12 00:30:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19120879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/agonies
Summary: Seunghyun considers a familiar face.





	alibi

“Been thinking about your cock,” Jackson groans, so deep it rumbles from his chest. “Can I suck it?”

Silent, Mark scoffs and eyes the dual display of his video loop of an empty corridor alongside the live feed of Jiyong, lithe in all black, flashing a cloned key card over a sensor. The door opens for him and he slips into the CFO’s office quicker than a cat.

“Oh, you wanna fuck my ass, baby? It’s been so long since I had it good and hard, I might blow as soon as you put it in me.” Jackson pumps a fist in the air at something, only to slap it back to the keyboard and resume his game of Tetris with intent. He’s squinting over the colored blocks, falling faster, and holding the phone to his ear between thumb and forefinger like an afterthought.

The live feed remains clear, the loop steady, and the security guard undoubtedly tenting his polyester slacks over Jackson’s attention never leaves his desk. This outcome should have been apparent since they cased the building yesterday evening, with Seunghyun as the formidable risk analyst featuring his most English of suits, a carefully applied scar up his jaw, Tom Ford glasses and a posture conveying a military background.

In theory Jackson was his muscle, should the recon go crooked. It can hardly be denied that he’s the sort you want watching your back. Once, putting himself between Seunghyun and an iron pipe, he was left with blood streaming from his scalp and a concussion that required nursing all night. For all that they’ve pricked and prodded each other these eight months since Jaebum formed them into something like a functional unit, for all that Jackson still won’t call Seunghyun by his name, he’s never goaded him about that day. How Seunghyun’s brains could have painted the concrete if he hadn’t been there.

It would never occur to him to gloat, Seunghyun thinks, not over that. Soldiers never change.

But in a polo shirt that strained across his chest and biceps, passing as tech support, Jackson proved more than diversion enough for the staring guard without lifting a finger. Just being himself. Seunghyun could have waltzed up and down the corridors with a bear and a brass band and gone unnoticed.

Pursing his lips and drawing out a lewd sound from behind his teeth, Jackson flicks a glance to the video feed. When Jiyong slips back into the hall, crouched low, he amps up the volume, a moan so convincing Seunghyun would believe he were riding cock and loving it if he hadn’t heard as much ten times over as Jackson stretched sore muscles for a workout.

It’s an unforgivable tell, the way Seunghyun crumples the papers in his grip. Rather than returning to his game, Jackson is watching him now, lazy grin slipping away like melting ice. Something hard passes behind his eyes. He knows how he looks, pornographic thighs splayed wide, bottom lip caught between his teeth on an encouraging grunt.

“Knew you’d fill me up good,” he says lowly. Monitor abandoned, colored blocks fall until the screen flashes defeat, and still he moans louder and doesn’t look away. If Seunghyun could only sneer at him, hold his gaze steady with carefully calibrated disdain, he'd be making a fool of himself. “Harder, baby, don’t stop.”

In San Francisco, at their sham cocktail party, he kissed Seunghyun's neck, just below his pulse. The spot burns now like a brand. He could find it even in the dark.

He doesn’t need to laugh, when Seunghyun turns heel and strides away from their makeshift field office. They both know he won.

 

 

“Are you still upstate?” Jinyoung sounds clipped, brisk. Like calling Seunghyun requires only a quarter of his attention at most, which is likely.

“Outside Buffalo,” Seunghyun mumbles around a chewed straw. He’s trying to smoke less, and every piece of plastic in reach is suffering for it. Jiyong steals his half-eaten pie and lifts one curious brow, then digs in, appeased, when the minute jerk of Seunghyun’s chin dispels concern. “Change of plans?” Toronto isn’t far, but they’ll arrive late as it is, and he’s been shy on sleep the past few days.

The others were scheduled to be back at headquarters this morning, he thinks with a flicker of unease. That’s half a day of radio silence he didn’t think to question. He’s losing his edge, playing white hat.

“There’s a storage facility in Rochester. I’ll send you the address.” He hangs up before Seunghyun can ask why, and that’s not like him either. Jaebum is the succinct one. Jinyoung prefers to hear every detail repeated back to him, and frowns over improvisation on a con as if Seunghyun could operate any other way.

“You up for a drive?” he asks, and the red and blue neon in the diner’s window cast shimmers and shadow over Jiyong’s cheek, his throat, when he tips his head back and drains his coffee. He hums a note and waits for Seunghyun to pass him the keys. Driving with Jiyong feels like having his guts scooped out like jam from the jar, but he can’t be beaten for time.

 

 

The car is old. Jiyong liked that, when they chose it for the drive. Liked the chrome and the wide seats, the shiny retrofits under the hood that meant nothing to Seunghyun but made Jiyong cackle, pleased. He leans against a fender now, thumb stroking circles over his knuckle. A sign of unease, maybe, but in the fifteen years he’s known Jiyong he never would have dreamed they could be here. Following instructions blind. Counting on anyone besides each other.

At the buzz, Seunghyun taps his earpiece twice.

“Tell Jiyong to start a video call.” Pressed intimately to his ear, Jackson’s voice sounds hoarse and strange, and the breeze steals away Seunghyun’s startled inhale. But he’s already hung up. Jiyong doesn’t ask why he should be the one to call. As usual, he reads too much in Seunghyun’s face.

“Towards the back,” Jackson says when they’re inside, a single bulb alight overhead and spilling gold out into the dark. “Between that chest and the wall.”

There are boxes in the unit, dusty and unremarkable. A rolled carpet, a toolbox. And leaning against the wall, wrapped in a blanket, there can only be a painting.

Tugging back one edge, Seunghyun knows what he’ll find. Somehow the bottom of his stomach drops away all the same.

Jackson is reading off a combination to Jiyong, letting him into a fire safe the size of a briefcase without delay. But Jiyong’s agile hand pauses and he turns when Seunghyun dips into his pocket and takes his switchblade from him.

“Company?” he murmurs, and Jackson goes quiet. Seunghyun shakes his head.

“Finish up.” But Jiyong is still angled towards him, trying to get a read. Unaccustomed to being anything but five steps ahead of Seunghyun himself. So Jackson can see, surely, when Seunghyun drags the quilt away from the canvas.

It was never meant to pass muster, the forgery. But he enjoyed it. Knew the shades of skin like he could taste them. His wrist was still bruised, when he was painting, from a run-in with Jackson in Osaka. Knew he’d be after the real Francis Bacon when it reached the auction house in Vienna. Seunghyun had never sustained a flirtation with someone who could kill him with his bare hands.

He thought, then, that they had an understanding. The way Jackson dragged his eyes down his body from a distance and left him scorching for days.

“Stop,” Jackson breaks when Seunghyun touches the blade to the inky background. But Jiyong swipes the screen and returns the phone to his pocket. Even does Seunghyun the dignity of turning his back as he opens the safe and lays hands on the external hard drive they came for.

“You good?” he addresses the wall, the words barely a sigh.

“Fine,” Seunghyun mutters. He feels the surface beneath a thumb, layers of black piled thick, and cuts an outline. The paint crackles when he peels it away, and the distorted eyes of the portrait survey him in reproach.

 

 

With the engine humming in the dark, nothing ahead or behind them but the silent shadowed alleys between storage buildings, Seunghyun leans over the open top of the convertible and presses the cigarette lighter. Waits.

Jiyong slides him a look. “I’m all out. Said you were trying to quit.”

When he covered the note, he used a layer of acrylic first, and so the oil paint above it hasn’t spoiled the contents of sharply creased paper. He could open it up and read it now, if he were so inclined.

The lighter pops out with a sound. He touches the red hot coil to the upper corner of the paper and it catches light as if ravenous. Slowly he turns the note, allowing the flame to spread evenly.

Jiyong waits until he flicks away the last of it, then turns on the headlights.

“San Francisco?” he asks over the road noise when faceless country is whipping past, but it was never really a question.

It was nearly a month ago that he and Jackson spent a week circling each other, posing as lovers. And just once, when it counted, Seunghyun couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Jackson still goads him in front of the others, and Seunghyun answers in kind. When they’re alone, rare and breathless, they haven’t spoken a word to each other since the job ended.

“It won’t affect the team,” Seunghyun answers, but that’s not what Jiyong means at all.

And the loud silence says, _I know you want him._ It says _this is different, you aren’t hiding from me. You want him so much you’re choking on it._

Seunghyun turns the dials of the radio, parsing through the static. But Jiyong drops one hand and flicks it off entirely. It’s not like him to press an issue. Their partnership, erratic as it may have been these fifteen years, has always been one of unquestioning acceptance. If Jiyong called, Seunghyun was on a plane. If Seunghyun were in a bind, Jiyong would lick his teeth and find him a way out of it.

“He’s good,” Jiyong says at last, neutral. His eyes are pinched, the way he gets when he’s wrestling with something.

“Sure he is,” Seunghyun agrees, baffled. The tension in his chest eases like a fist unclenching. “There’s nobody I’d rather have in a fight.”

Jiyong makes a tight, frustrated sound. He’s looking ahead on the empty road, unwavering.

“That’s not it.” His hands flex on the wheel. “He’s _good_.”

After his discharge from the marine police, Wang Jiaer was an enforcer in Hong Kong. Seunghyun has seen the dossier. Jaebum assembled files on all of them, naturally, and of course Mark hacked those in turn. And as clever as Mark is with computers, he’s not brimming over with guile. At headquarters, the loft with its eastern view, he thinks nothing of leaving a room with his computer unlocked.

Of course, Jiyong isn’t a man for traditional metrics of right and wrong.

And never, in all these years. Has he simply called someone _good_.

But the Jiyong he’d always known was half feral. He’d laugh with blood in his teeth, didn’t like to be touched, not even when Seunghyun was helping him limp on a turned ankle. He treated thanks and praise with the same narrow eyed suspicion. For months at a time they’d have radio silence, no sign of life, and then Jiyong was tapping outside his window in a new city with a promise of poorly guarded diamonds and A Guy on standby to laser off the serial numbers.

That Jiyong never would have slept tucked against Jackson, cheek turned to his shoulder. Soft and unguarded like Seunghyun had only ever seen him when they had no choice but to wait out the day in a Parisian attic and sleep in shifts. Yet that’s exactly how he found them, on the sofa at the loft with pale dawn breaking over them. Bruises were darkening up Jackson’s cheek like splotches of ink and Jiyong’s hand was curled loosely over his chest, where his heart would be.

“When you jumped, how did you know I’d catch you,” Jackson wondered once, icing his bruised shoulder in the kitchen and enduring Jiyong’s idle prodding.

Jiyong shrugged. “You did.”

Now Jiyong licks his lips against the wind and Seunghyun breathes in very slowly.

“What’d it say?” The letter, he means. The one he left for Jackson to find, but of course he never did. No soul for art, if Jackson can’t eat it or fuck it or punch it he has no use for it.

“Doesn’t matter.” Like an amateur, Seunghyun finds he’s been biting his cuticle in thought. The skin is torn, smearing blood over his lip. “It was before Macau.”

The drive is quiet, after that.

 

 

“Drink?”

They’ve delivered the hard drive, whatever Jinyoung needed it for so urgently that Jackson would allow them access. Now the last job is really behind them, loose ends tucked away and a crooked investment fund’s managers drained of cash, the families they robbed sitting lush on the discreet, many times rerouted deposits Mark finesses so well.  

Sometimes Seunghyun used to think the aftermath was as satisfying as the heist. Studying the cunning edges of Jiyong’s face for the first time in months, sharing a bottle of wine and their favorite brand of cigarettes. Even now, there’s an air of ritual about it. Taking a step back from the team, its noise, Jaebum’s dogged idealism and Jackson. Always Jackson, bleeding the air from around him like an open flame.

Things seemed so much clearer when it was just the two of them, he thinks wistfully. But back then he never knew when Jiyong might come or go. He’s grown accustomed to his nearness these past months with dizzying ease.

“Nah.” Jiyong is the only one who knows where Seunghyun lives. The only one he can imagine standing in his doorway, hair damp with misting rain. But he hasn’t even kicked off his shoes. He takes in the painting on the otherwise bare wall with fresh eyes, slow and considering. “Might see Chaerin, might crash.”

“Something you want to say?” It comes out tetchy and doesn’t ruffle Jiyong in the slightest.

He tucks his hands into the pockets of his oversized coat and stretches. “You both decided to work together.”

“And you think that means something?”

“Everything means _something_ ,” Jiyong pronounces with grave, thoughtful clarity. Then he leaves.

 

 

Seunghyun drinks his wine alone and studies the painting. The real one, hung upon the exposed brick wall with a bronze picture light overhead.

 _Creepy_ , Jackson had called it in Vienna, before he knew Seunghyun had already swapped his forgery at the auction house. The colors are intimate, bruised, the face distorted.

 _Monstrous and lovely_ , Seunghyun had agreed. He fancied he could hold his tongue then, sip his champagne, estimating the hours before Jackson would steal the painting and discover what was hidden for him there.

He thought they might speak at length on the matter, later. Why Seunghyun loved something enough to steal it for himself. Don’t you think we each have our own portrait, just like this, he wanted to say. One that doesn’t age for us but wears all our sins and hurts. Don’t we wish someone would be gentle with that face. Don’t we ache for that kind of tenderness.

 

 

The door of the loft swings inward and Seunghyun is arrested in his stride. Jackson is wearing a leather jacket zipped up to his throat and carrying a duffel bag. A thin blue stripe peers over his pocket. The edge of his passport, the Canadian one Seunghyun made him.

After a beat of silence, Seunghyun crosses the threshold. The lock whirs into place behind him. As if nothing were amiss, he ignores the tension in Jackson’s jaw and bends to ease off his loafers.

“It’s nearly two,” he says, conversational, and doesn’t miss the involuntary twitch of Jackson’s eyes towards the hall, where Jinyoung and Jaebum must be asleep in their room, and Mark the next door down. If Jackson didn't have a lap dog's desperation for companionship, he could live alone and avoid binds just like this.

“Glad you can still tell time,” Jackson hisses back. “I’ll cancel the night nurse. What are you doing here?”

“Who else could I _possibly_ be here to see?” he snaps back, loud enough that Jackson drops his bag and lunges, propelling him back against the door and slapping a hand over Seunghyun’s mouth.

After a warning glare, he shifts his hand to pin Seunghyun in place at his sternum. He’s so strong, effortlessly so, that another night this would flush Seunghyun with want and resentment.

“Why are you sneaking out?” he forces himself to whisper. Jackson hasn’t shaved and up close his eyes are bloodshot. When they all parted ways across the border two days ago he didn’t look this haggard. Just softly rumpled, pouring sugar into his coffee while Mark packed his equipment. He hummed the tune of an old television program under his breath and taught Jiyong the words when he asked, slipping into Cantonese and guiding his pronunciation.

“There’s something I have to take care of and it can’t wait,” Jackson mutters.

“You didn’t pack for a weekend,” Seunghyun observes. “When are you coming back?”

But Jackson averts his eyes and withdraws his hand.

“You aren’t coming back,” he says slowly.

“Move.” It’s barely a puff of air. Jackson could bust his kneecaps in like walnuts, or suckerpunch him so hard Seunghyun would be left heaving his wine onto the floor. He doesn’t. And Seunghyun doesn’t move. He feels like a painted prophet, flames rising from his scalp.

“Were you going to tell _anyone_?” Jerking Jackson’s collar in his fist doesn’t unnerve him. He’s staring at the lapel of Seunghyun’s suit, a hard furrow pressed between his brows. “Not a word to Jiyong? He _trusts_ you, and this is how you treat him?”

Jackson is breathing through his mouth, controlled. The way he clears his head in a fistfight.

“That’s what you have to say to me? Just Jiyong, that’s it. No other reason.”

“You have no idea how hard it is for him to let people in,” Seunghyun begins, only for Jackson to force the length of his thumb between his teeth like a bridle. When Seunghyun snarls and bears his jaw down he doesn’t even flinch.

“Tell me what you took,” he whispers back, edged in warning, and gives him use of his mouth again.

A stone sits in his throat. “A letter.”

“What’d you do with it?”

He swallows. “I burned it.”

“So why should I tell you anything,” Jackson laughs below his breath. “You said you never lied to me. But you sure don’t tell the whole truth, do you?”

A fine tremor takes his hand at Jackson’s collar. “Try me.” Even hushed like this, cautious as they were in the dark in Macau, the words hang in the air.

Something furious passes behind Jackson’s eyes. He’s closer now, close enough for the warmth of his breath to curl over Seunghyun’s throat.

“You ever slept with someone to get what you want?” he asks softly, unkindly, and the way he unbuttons Seunghyun’s collar is more devastating than if he had torn it away.

He exhales. “Yes,” he agrees hoarsely.

“That’s right,” Jackson breathes. His hands are steady. Another button, and another, but he’s watching Seunghyun’s face. “What, nothing clever to say? Tell me again how I’d beg for it.”

But Seunghyun is silent. His hands fall to Jackson’s forearms, the shift and flex of muscle obscured by leather.

At his ribs Jackson pauses. He strokes his thumb over the length of the puckered scar. “Where’d you get this?”

“Card game,” he says thickly.

“You lose?”

Seunghyun inhales, sharp. “I won.”

Jackson’s hands slow. “Yeah." Unreadable. “Sometimes winning is worse. But none of this really matters, does it? Nothing’s real with you.” Still his hands are mapping his skin, tracing the shape of his ribs down to his belly, the edge of his belt. He holds Seunghyun’s eyes when he palms him through his slacks, squeezes just this side of painful.

At a muffled sound they both freeze, but the loft is quiet again. Nothing stirs down the hall.

“We all lie,” Seunghyun begins, then bites off a grunt when the hand between his legs fondles him in earnest. No shyness, just hard efficiency while Jackson lifts his chin in a challenge. “Do you hate me because I haven’t fucked you, or because you want me to so badly?”

Jackson’s hands are so deft on his belt that the buckle falling open makes no sound. There’s not enough spit in his palm to ease the rasp of his calluses, and Seunghyun’s head falls back against the door as a shudder takes him. He couldn’t choose not to respond, any more than he ever could have refused when Jackson melted into him on a dark summer night and kissed him.

“Look at me.” Jackson twists his wrist, then rubs his thumb over the aching slit until Seunghyun pants. Perspiration blooms across his skin, a flush he can feel down his chest. “You said this would _mean something_ , right? So fucking show me.”

“You didn’t ask me what the letter said,” Seunghyun manages. As if suspecting a diversion, Jackson doesn’t slow his stroking. And Seunghyun leaps in his palm as if he were a teenager again, so hungry to be touched he thought it might eat him from the inside out, even as his gut twists with the wrongness of it all. “It was for you.”

Now he stills. Seunghyun wants to smudge out the shape of his eyes in charcoal, the lushness of his mouth. Just like this, if he never sees them again.

“I had faith you’d be able to steal it. Planned for it,” Seunghyun continues unsteadily when Jackson doesn’t respond. Just holding Seunghyun’s cock inside his slacks, looking lost. “All this time I thought you’d found the letter. In Macau, I thought—”

His eyes sting like he’s been smoking too long. Jackson must see as well. Slowly, he draws his fingertips up Seunghyun’s sternum to curl over the shape of the words in his throat.

“Pretend I believe you,” he swallows. At the wrong end of a gun he’s never looked this fragile. “What did it say?”

He doesn’t resist when Seunghyun strokes his hair back from his temple.

“It said, _my name is Seunghyun_ ,” he begins, and Jackson chokes on a protest. “It said, _I’d like to see you again. I dreamed once that I kissed the palms of your hands and I thought you should know._ ”

Jackson’s expression is opaque. “So you lied.”

“I didn’t,” Seunghyun gasps an unsteady breath. “I wanted to hear you call me by my real name.”

After he adjusts Seunghyun in his briefs, he zips him up and buckles his belt. He buttons his shirt for him and fastens his gaze to a point beyond his shoulder.

“It doesn’t matter now.” Even when he pulls his hands away it feels as though Jackson is squeezing the air from his throat. “I’ve told you all, anyway. And you don’t believe me.”

Jackson bites the inside of his cheek. The anger’s bled out of him, his shoulders slumping.

“Seunghyun,” he starts, and his imagination can’t compare to the low rasp of Jackson’s voice shaping his name for the first time. When Seunghyun kisses him, shallow and crooked and helpless, he shivers all over.

“I have to go back to Hong Kong.” Unthinking, he turns to meet Seunghyun’s thumb stroking his cheek, and something knotted in his chest unravels so swiftly he’s left weightless and dizzy with clarity. Even in bruised shadows his face is a revelation. His mouth is soft under Seunghyun’s, yielding. Not a surrender but a cautious invitation.

“So you won’t go alone,” he promises.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Alibi" by Mansionair  
>    
> [the painting](https://www.artsy.net/artwork/francis-bacon-portrait-of-isabel-rawsthorne)  
> [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/taeminsgucci)  
> 


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